Ecocriticism - Review of 2007-8 PDF

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Ecocriticism
Ecocriticism
greg garrard
This first review of ecocritical theory in The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural
Theory covers the years 2007 and 2008. It is divided into five sections:
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1. Normal Science: The Usual Practice of Ecocriticism; 2. Re-enchantment:
The Argument against ‘Scientism’; 3. Against Nature: The Ecocritical
Challenge to Extant Ideas of Nature; 4. Ecological Materialism: Approaches
Founded in Marxism or Science; 5. Globality/Postcoloniality: The Shift from
a Sense of Place to a Sense of Planet.
A note on terminology: as leaders in the field, Lawrence Buell and Jonathan
Bate have expressed a preference for the names ‘environmental criticism’
and ‘ecopoetics’, respectively. Nevertheless, while ‘ecocriticism’ risks
sounding faddish or raising scientistic expectations, it is the most prevalent
and widely accepted name for cultural criticism from an environmentalist
perspective, and I call it ‘ecocriticism’. The years 2007 and 2008 have seen a
range of fundamental challenges to the dominant critical paradigm, none of
which on its own is unprecedented but which, taken together, constitute a
genuine alteration of the theoretical terrain. So first it seems wise briefly to
canvass establish practice—or ‘normal science’—the better to highlight how
significant the rival paradigms might be.
1. Normal Science: The Usual Practice of Ecocriticism

From the outset, ecocritics have considered themselves environmentalists in
a political sense, and have reflected on the relationship of that identity to the
demands and compromises of largely helpless participation in consumerism
and professional academic life. Non-fictional nature writing, hitherto ignored
or despised by the literary academy, was redeemed and redeployed to chal-
lenge what was seen as a biophobic, ecocidal Western culture. Rather like
the development of feminist criticism and ‘gynocritics’ described long ago by
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Elaine Showalter, ecocriticism has at once critiqued ‘representations of

nature’ and proposed its own canon of ecopoets.
A delightful example of the former is David Whitley’s The Idea of Nature
in Disney Animation. As the title suggests, the project of this book is barely
distinct in literary-theoretical terms from pre-ecocritical surveys of nature
thematics (in, say, Shakespeare or D.H. Lawrence): it does exactly what it
says on the tin. Whitley knows full well the stringency of the critiques that
have been levelled at Disney’s massively anthropomorphic feature anima-
tions: ‘Again and again, Disney animated features make a play for our
feelings; inventing animals with exaggerated features that enhance their
cuteness; creating characters out of stereotypes that are finessed by charm

and humour; developing stock situations with a twist designed to engage the
audience’s feelings with renewed potency’ (p. 2)—animal studies critic Steve
Baker has coined the term ‘disnification’ to describe this process. But
Whitley is determined to speak a word for sentiment in general—especially
in the context of children’s films—so long as it is qualified by close critical
attention to particular cases.
Bookending Disney’s major productions, he is most enthusiastic for Bambi
(which inspired a generation of conservationists even as it thoroughly sani-
tized the forest) and Finding Nemo, thanks to the way they combine direct
environmentalist advocacy, close (albeit selective) attention to biological
detail, and anthropomorphic family drama. The animators for Finding
Nemo expended tremendous effort getting the reef just right, but balked
at the zoologically realistic option of transsexualizing clownfish Nemo’s
father Marlin when his mother was eaten. Pocohontas gains fewer plaudits,
not only for its idealizing representation of the Ecological Indian (of whom
more later) but for the way Native ‘animism’ is made complicit with the
commodification of animals by Disney’s retail arm: when Captain Smith and
Pocohontas are threatened by a bear, the ‘ecological’ recognition that she is a
protective mother soon gives way to a romantic cuddle with her cub that
owes much more to the teddy bear trade than to good sense in bear country.
Thus ‘[t]he transformation of wild animals into the equivalent of pets and
accessories is sanctioned in Pocohontas by the supposedly Indian notion of an
enchanted, animistic world within which all life forms are connected’
(p. 87). Whitley presents his analysis unapologetically as somewhat theoreti-
cally naı̈ve—‘nature’ is not questioned carefully in all its contradictory sig-
nification, and the problem of anthropomorphism is rather painlessly
dispatched—but he gives some consideration to Disney’s corporate history
and policies, and more importantly combines acute critical attention with a
lightness of touch that refuses to ‘murder to dissect’.
Ecocriticism | 3
A kindred form of geniality characterizes Scott Slovic’s Going Away to

Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility. Both book and author
epitomize the so-called ‘backpacker school of criticism’: texts discussed
include nature writer Rick Bass and the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, while
Slovic describes ecocritics as ‘muscular scholars’ (p. 18) at once entranced by
the electronically mediated ‘life of the mind’ and compelled to bust out of its
institutionalized routines: ‘Whatever it takes, I think to myself . . . whatever
it takes to revivify experience, to bring my mind to life, may be well worth
the cost’ (p. 10). In a brief manifesto for ecocriticism, Slovic argues that
‘[w]e must not reduce our scholarship to an arid, hyperintellectual game,
devoid of smells and tastes, devoid of actual experience. . . . Literary schol-

arship and literature itself are, on the most fundamental level, associated
with human values and attitudes’ (p. 28). One manifestation of this is the
genre Slovic calls ‘narrative scholarship’, which blends autobiographical re-
flection, political critique and cultural analysis. In a chapter exploring an
impossible demand that extends from compassion to the brink of the incon-
ceivable, ‘Be Prepared for the Worst’, Slovic invites us to ‘[i]magine . . . a
time sooner or later when what you cherish this moment will be no more.
What do you love? Think about it now. And now, one breath later, believe
that it is gone’ (p. 55). Moving from the loss of extinct animals to the death
of his own son, Pablo, Slovic forces the reader to trace the modulations of
grief, nostalgia and rhapsodic lyricism. Narrative scholarship is inherently
controversial and difficult to achieve well, and although Slovic approaches the
task with enormous tact, this reader’s response, conditioned in part by
national/ethnic and class codes of restraint and privacy, was acute discom-
fort. The essay provokes us to consider what it might mean actually to grieve
environmental loss, but it also, in a peculiar way, draws unwitting attention
to the coercive undertow of that phrase, its intolerable demand for proleptic
elegy: ‘Be prepared for the worst’.
Much of the book bears witness to Slovic’s tireless labour of ecocritical
organization, starting as a founder member of the Association for the Study
of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) in the USA, continuing as editor
of the predominant journal in the field, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and
the Environment, and now extending to a key role as midwife to numerous
ecocriticism associations worldwide. The sheer effort required to foster the
unusual coherence and congeniality of the ecocriticism community is evident
here, but then so are the risks of ingroup ostracism that plague it: Dana
Phillips’s enjoyably astringent critique of nature writing The Truth of Ecology
(OUP. [2003]) is condemned as ‘witty slander’ while Michael P. Cohen’s
‘Blues in Green: Ecocriticism under Critique’ is unjustly dismissed as a
4 | Ecocriticism
‘rant’. Unlike Al Gore, whose limo, laptop and flight case in An Inconvenient
Truth tended to provide unintended counterpoint to his environmental mes-
sage, Slovic’s narratives are consistently reflective: his desire to ‘belong’ to
his locale—the defining ‘bioregional’ urge of the species of ecocriticism one
might call ‘centripetal’—is pervaded by a proper sense of ‘tenuousness and
transience’, but is perhaps too easily cured by ‘a walk through sage and
rabbitbrush, through vanilla-smelling Jeffrey pines, collecting the dust of
here and now on my sandal-clad feet’ (p. 82). Even the indubitable value
of encouraging the spread of the ecocritical movement around the world—
let alone mere individual reconnection with the physical world—may be
inadequate compensation for the carbon cost of the peripatetic,

resource-intensive life we share as modern academics, ecocritical or not.
The environmentalist ambitions of ecocriticism have always and will
always be vulnerable. Slovic tells us that ecopoetry and nature writing
‘guides us to pay deeper attention to our physical senses and enables us to
appreciate our own embeddedness in the world . . . [and] enables us to de-
velop and clarify and articulate our feelings about the world’s meaning, its
value’ (p. 136). That attention, appreciation and sense of value should alter
our behaviour and thence our ecological impact, but in practice, the last two
crucial links in the chain have seldom been discussed, let alone subjected to
empirical proof. Louise Westling, for example, whose The Green Breast of the
New World (UGeoP. [1996]) remains the finest sustained example of ecofem-
inist literary criticism, argues for the ‘chiasmic’ intertwining of ‘embodi-
ment’ and the ‘flesh of the world’ in ‘Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty:
Ecopoetics and the Problem of Humanism’, her contribution to Gifford
and Becket’s Culture, Creativity and Environment: New Environmentalist
Criticism. Criticizing Heidegger’s residual anti-Darwinian humanism, she
asks, reasonably enough: ‘When, exactly, did humans diverge from their
co-evolved living kin and become capable of Dasein? With Lucy, or the
newest fossil finds in South Africa? With homo habilis? At the time of the
cave paintings in Combray, or those at Lascaux?’ (p. 240), Merleau-Ponty’s
attack on Cartesian mind-matter dualism posits ‘flesh’ as a kind of elemental
unity, and universal ‘sensibility . . . as the return of the visible upon itself, a
carnal adherence of the sentient to the sensed and of the sensed to sentient’
(quoted p. 243). Poetry in particular, thanks to its simultaneously cerebral/
conceptual and visceral/rhythmic character, can be seen as ‘narcissistic,
eroticized, endowed with natural magic that attracts other significations
into its web, as the body feels the world in feeling itself’ (quoted p. 244).
However, while it would be wrong simply to dismiss the potential of
‘bringing people (especially students) to their senses’, consumerism is far
Ecocriticism | 5
too keenly attuned to the pleasures of the flesh—or at least, a part of its
repertoire—and quick to enable profitable cyborg transgressions of the
Cartesian animal/human/machine boundaries for the phenomenological
project to appear progressive on its own terms. Either experiences are
defined in terms of a notion of ‘authenticity’ capable of distinguishing be-
tween the refreshing effects of meditating or canoeing and, say, motorcycle
racing—hard to achieve without circularity—or else an alien Marxist or
ecologistic calculus of ‘real needs’ or ‘sustainability’ has to be imported to
do the job, in which case it is unclear what contribution phenomenology
made in the first place. There is certainly no global shortage of critiques of
Cartesian dualism.

There is always the risk of buying environmentalism on the cheap, as if to
persuade readers of ‘interconnectedness’ were a self-evident virtue. One
example of this among very many that could have been chosen—especially
from studies of poetry for some reason—is Mary Newell’s ‘Gestures toward
Cross-Species Reciprocal Relations in Contemporary Poetics’ in an ecocriti-
cism special edition of online journal Reconstruction (7:ii[2007]). Although its
modest ambitions should perhaps be inferred from its title, Newell’s reading
of Mary Oliver, Heller Levinson and Adrienne Rich seems appropriately
underwhelmed by the discovery of scenes of ‘seeing and being seen’ in
their poetry: ‘To the extent that we experience the reciprocity of perceiving
and being perceived, the implicit reflexivity could be an incitement toward
feeling accountable to other life forms’ (Section 4). A poetic ‘gesture’ that
provokes an ‘implicit’ sensation that ‘could be an incitement’ at least con-
cedes the tenuousness of its own claims. The real problem, though, is the
very widespread assumption that realization of ‘interconnectedness’ has
some unproblematic moralizing force, even though the most potent forms
of interconnectedness we experience—of family, sexuality, ethnicity and
nationality—can breed uniquely lethal dissensions. In fact, one suspects
that interconnectedness can be celebrated to the precise extent that it does
not really matter to us.
At the same time, Newell draws from the poetry an engaging sense of
restraint, a principled refusal to appropriate the animal Other that Kate
Rigby has dubbed a ‘negative poetics’ for ecocriticism. The poetry is seen
as at once evoking and refraining, naming and marvelling, although the
substantial formal differences among the primary texts—as between lyric
nature poetry, Modernist free verse and narrative prose—barely register.
Amanda Boetzkes’ ‘Contemporary Art Facing the Earth’s Irreducibility’ from
the same special edition practices a similar kind of ambivalence, but exhibits
somewhat greater discrimination among the earth artists it discusses.
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Boetzkes claims, plausibly, that ‘artworks [by Chris Drury, Ana Mendieta and
Jackie Brookner] stage the kind of event that Irigaray calls for: an encounter
between the artist and the earth as other, where the earth is located beyond
our limits of perception but is nevertheless a network of activity and events
to which the artwork is connected’ (Section 10). In contrast with the notion
of Romantic immersion associated with early earthworks, which she sees
now as a kind of consumption or appropriation, the site-specific installations
and performances produce contact as excess: ‘they assert the body as a
surface that separates itself from the earth, and at the same time provides
a surface on which the ephemeral materializations of nature occur. The earth
appears on the performed body in influxes of light and colour, the appear-

ance of spectral shapes, or in a flourish of growth. While evoking an abun-
dance of sensation, however, these transient expressions disclose the earth’s
withdrawal from a totalized representation’ (Abstract). Just as ‘literary
theory’ has tended to seep out into the wider cultural domain, informing
developments in other artforms and proximate disciplines, it seems that
ecocritical theory may follow suit; the conjunction in negative poetics of
passionate engagement and principled refusal offers an appealing reconcili-
ation of the desire for mimesis and the fear of what Martin Heidegger called
‘en-framing’.
Annette Kolodny, whose work on pioneer literature was claimed as
ecocriticism avant la lettre early on, has provided a stellar example of eco-
critical rhetorical analysis in ‘Rethinking the Ecological Indian: A Penobscot
Precursor’ (Isle 14:i[2007]). Shepard Krech III’s extensive historical survey
The Ecological Indian (Norton. [2000]), which exploded the myth of Native
‘environmentalism’ even as it reinforced the historical evidence for the so-
phistication of indigenous environmental knowledge and practices, showed
how modern Indians appropriated the myth for political purposes. Kolodny’s
essay, though, shows how Joseph Nicolar’s The Life and Traditions of the Red
Man (1893) predates these efforts by nearly a century. Nicolar adopted, but
also transformed, Euro-American political, economic and scientific con-
structs such as land ownership and ‘polygenesis’, the theory of separate
racial creation. He represented Euro-Americans as a distinct species,
doomed to destroy the land they colonized, whereas the Penobscot
Indians, clinging on to scattered remnants of their ancestral lands, were
cast as rightful custodians. ‘[T]he act of composing this book’, Kolodny
argues, ‘may be seen as Nicolar’s attempt to forge a kind of antecedent
cultural unity for future generations of Penobscots in the face of a chaotic
and fragmented past. Given his goals to preserve traditions and create at least
a semblance of cultural coherence and continuity, it is noteworthy that
Ecocriticism | 7
Nicolar built into his construction of that continuity an authoritative basis for
his people’s current attempts to assert conservatorship over their ancient
homelands’ (p. 15). So, paradoxically, while Nicolar’s Noble Indian (the
forerunner of the Ecological Indian) was precisely a myth of ahistorical
passivity, he proved capable of employing it actively in the historical struggle
of the Penobscot Nation to defend their land. Kolodny’s essay shows how
ecocritics have derived productive new directions from sceptical critique
such as Krech’s, and allows us to estimate the considerable potential yield
of attentive ecocritical historicism.

2. Re-enchantment: The Argument against ‘Scientism’
Some time around 29 February 2008, the environmental philosopher Val
Plumwood died of a stroke at her remote home in the Australian outback.
Decades before, she had survived a saltwater crocodile attack, recounting the
event in a powerful reflective piece entitled ‘Being Prey’. The trajectory that
links her early work on environmental values (as Val Routley), through the
formidably argued Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (Routledge [1993]), to
the influential Environmental Culture (Routledge [2001]) culminated, as it
turned out, in a work of narrative scholarship presented at an ASLE-UK
conference, ‘Journey to the Heart of Stone’, which headlines the Gifford and
Becket anthology. Its objective is plainly stated: ‘The cultural tasks for a
critical green ecological writing are many, but should include opening read-
ers to ways of challenging the experiential framework of dead and silent
matter entrenched by the sado-dispassionate rationality of scientific reduc-
tionism’ (pp. 17–18). Always rational in defiance of rationalism, Plumwood
strove to articulate a materialist spirituality that would achieve ‘the
re-enchantment or re-enspiriting of the realm designated material (which
includes reclaiming agency and intentionality for matter)’ and confront
‘bullying concepts and jargon, such as anthropomorphism, that have
helped to delegitimate richly intentional ways of understanding the
world’. Her evocation of ‘stone spirits’ seems the ultimate test-case, given
the inanimate, anonymous insignificance attributed to all but the most sub-
lime of stones in Western culture. Reflecting on the balanced rock that
seemed to presage the crocodile attack, or the massive Heartstone she
dug up, slowly and painfully, for the threshold of her hut, she argues that
‘it came to seem far from ‘‘romantic’’, in the common meaning of imprac-
tical, absurd or irrational, to think of stones as potential prophets, teachers
and powers or agents in our lives’ (p. 29). To explain away the agency of
8 | Ecocriticism
stone is to collude with the mastery narrative that posits human Reason as
radically distinct from and superior to ‘mere’ matter. Conversely, proclaim-
ing the supernatural powers of stones (as in the New Age crystal industry)
would be to connive in the Reason-nature duality in inverted form.
Patrick Curry, another environmental ethicist, has picked up the torch
from Plumwood, claiming in ‘Nature Post-Nature’ that ‘it can hardly be
doubted that the modernist rationalization of the natural world, its conse-
quent disenchantment, and its subsequent commodification play an integral
role in driving the ongoing global ecocrisis’ (p. 54). This contribution to
Earthographies: Ecocriticism and Culture, an important special edition of the
journal New Formations (64[Spring 2008]) edited by Wendy Wheeler and

Hugh Dunkerley, distinguishes carefully between ecocidal ‘anthropocen-
trism’ and the legitimate species interests represented by ‘humanism’, and
between overweening ‘scientism’ and modest ‘sciences’. Curry persuasively
argues for moral pluralism, bolstered if necessary by tactical essentialism,
and for neo-animist re-enchantment. Yet the vividly schematic contrasts
Plumwood and Curry rely upon are at once too vaguely capacious and too
narrowly exclusive. If disenchantment means Cartesian denial of agency and
value to all but the rational ego (what one might call anti-anthropomorphic
atheism), one would be hard put to locate it anywhere in contemporary
culture or science: we mourn our pets and cajole our laptops while some
plead with their gods or planets as before, and even hard-line Darwinian
atheists such as Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson are effusive with
the intricate beauties of adaptive structure and the inherent value of bio-
diversity. Our reluctance to attribute agency to stones might then be
seen only as anti-anthropomorphic agnosticism: given that we know human
nature is inclined to bestow soulfulness willy-nilly, a certain caution—
professionalized for scientists—would seem sensible. Since animistic cultures
have apparently been responsible for extinction events in North America,
Aotearoa New Zealand, Madagascar, Micronesia and elsewhere, it seems the
relationship of disenchantment and ecological assault is, at best, extremely
indirect.
While Plumwood and, to a lesser extent, Curry disavow New Age
mysticism, the implications of their view for ecocritical practice are, from
the point of view of secular reason, generally dire. A striking exception is
Anthony Lioi’s ‘An End to Cosmic Loneliness: Alice Walker’s Essays as
Abolitionist Enchantment’ (Isle 15:i[2008]). Animated with a refreshing
energy and directness, the essay admits the risks involved in discussing
black women and magic in conjunction, but proceeds in any case: ‘In a
disenchanted, racist academy, one speaks of the workings of the Spirit at
Ecocriticism | 9
one’s peril. My own approach will be more direct: the claim that Walker’s
essays are instruments of enchantment is meant as deixis, not figuration. The
essays enact a semiotic enchantment, a renovation of the world of signs, as a
foundation for material and political enchantment. Her essays are not like an
enchantment; they are an enchantment’ (p. 13). Pursuing the logic of
Weber’s analysis of disenchantment into the entanglement of modernity
and slavery, Lioi asks: ‘[i]f slave-masters are masters . . . does it follow that
disenchantment abets slave-holding? Or, to put it in Walker’s terms, does
enchantment promote liberation?’ (p. 15) In an impressive close reading of
Alice Walker’s essay, ‘Am I Blue?’, about her relationship with a horse, Lioi

exhibits his own forms of interpretive mastery and enchantment.
Articulating a black woman writer’s necessary ambivalence towards an
animal one might see as enslaved Lioi observes that ‘[b]y her own admission,
Walker is in the position of the slave-holder relative to Blue and therefore in
a double bind: in the terms of slave society, she is too like the horse to be
trusted, while in terms of contemporary society, she is too unlike the horse
to be trusted’ (p. 21). By asking ‘Am I Blue?’ she at once risks theriomorphic
racial identification with the horse and the charge of anthropomorphism.
Only from within this problematic nexus of race and species, though, can
Walker attempt a risky shift of the slave-narrative genre to the environment:
the slavery of the biosphere requires what Lioi calls ‘abolitionist enchant-
ment’. To such a politico-spiritual movement ‘the sign of a just world-order
is the end of cosmic loneliness’ (p. 31). Alien as it is to this reader, his vision
and his reading are unusually compelling, although Lioi’s dance across the
minefield of his topic would be difficult (indeed, dangerous) for less graceful
critics to emulate.
3. Against Nature: The Ecocritical Challenge to Extant

Ideas of Nature
The most deliberate and ambitious attempt to shift the ecocritical paradigm
is Timothy Morton’s fiendishly impenetrable Ecology without Nature:
Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Like Dana Phillips and others who have
criticized the mainstream, one suspects that Morton started out politically
and intellectually engaged with ecocriticism willy-nilly, but—like Pip suf-
fering Joe’s blundering visit to his London digs—a trifle embarrassed by its
homespun resilience to metropolitan fashions. This book seems specifically
designed to smarten it up and make it new friends in the literary academy,
and in that respect it seems likely to succeed. The cost to the reader of that
10 | Ecocriticism
determination, and to the author’s argument, would be intolerably high were

it not for Morton’s fierce intelligence and wry humour, the remarkable
insights he occasionally yields, and especially his marvellous aptitude as a
poetry critic.
Morton is certainly capable of lively, intelligible prose: the first thirty-six
pages of the book employ it, and every now and again he delivers a usefully
quotable phrase: ‘The more I try to show you what lies beyond this page, the
more of a page I have’ (p. 30); ‘Irony is the refreshing and consistent
noncoincidence of what is in our heads with what is the case’ (p. 193);
‘We are the world, unfortunately’ (p. 108). For the reader, desperate, after a

while, for plain sense, every soundbite is a gasp of air to a drowning swim-
mer; while for generations of graduate students to come, they will provide
the lever with which to tilt a thesis into movement. For the most
part, though, Ecology without Nature is a dispiriting, often infuriating thicket
of what Steven Pinker calls ‘display prose’, designed more for impact
than communication. One indication of its purpose is the unnerving
habit Morton has of reifying his own book: ‘Ecology without Nature
takes nature out of the equation by exploring the ways in which literary
writing tries to conjure it up’ (p. 19); ‘Ecology without Nature itself risks
becoming a ‘‘super-new, ultra-improved’’ version of the syndrome it has
been exploring all this time, consumerist appreciation for the reified
world of nature’ (p. 155). At first it seems merely Napoleonic, but even-
tually its hypnotic repetition reveals itself as a kind of branding—‘Coke is it!
Coke is it!’
To be precise, Ecology without Nature (there it is again!) is a rebranding: as
Buell and Bate had shown, having your own term to use instead of ‘ecocriti-
cism’ emphasizes your intellectual leadership as well as offering market
positioning; hence Morton’s ‘ecocritique’. While its argument is, naturally,
highly resistant to summary, its central claim is that, contrary to the main-
stream assumption, Romanticism and nature writing (or ‘ecomimesis’) are
not opposed to consumerism, but are in fact forms of it. Morton’s previous
books on Romanticism prepared the ground impeccably here, providing
historical texture to what might have seemed no more than a standard
deconstructive manoeuvre. The conclusion hovers on the boundary between
radical insight and banality:
It is strange to discover a secret passage between bottles of detergent
and mountain ranges. But there is one, and it is called Romantic
consumerism. Green consumerism is only one kind of environmental
consumerism. Environmentalisms in general are consumerist. (p. 114)
Ecocriticism | 11
Deconstruction always relies on distension of concepts to generate its char-

acteristic forms of dangerous supplementarity—think of bloated monsters
like ‘the performative’, ‘abjection’ or, long ago, ‘writing’. The totalizing
sense of ‘consumerism’ here is utterly disabling to liberal environmentalism,
and is presumably meant to be, although Morton’s more radical ‘left’
alternatives are alluded to only vaguely. SUVs, books of nature writing,
organic vegetable boxes and carbon credits are indeed all consumer com-
modities, and some (all?) indulge ‘romantic consumerism’, but to have
said so is to have said nothing, so far, of ecological significance, let alone
political value.
The other bind for ecomimesis (and the ecocriticism that allegedly

maintains insufficient distance from it), repeated ad nauseam in Ecology
without Nature, is that the attempt to evoke in writing the presence of
nature, its environing or ‘ambient’ quality, helplessly generates more
writing that differs/defers it. Morton exemplifies the claim in nifty and
memorable style by deconstructing a cliché, prevalent in ecomimetic
writing (e.g. Slovic, pp. 10–11), that is designed to establish the proximity
of nature:
As I write this, I am sitting on the seashore. The gentle sound of
waves lapping against my deck chair coincides with the sound of
my fingers typing away at the laptop. . . . No—that was pure fiction;
just a tease. As I write this, a western scrub jay is chattering outside
my window, harmonizing with the quiet scratch of my pen . . .
That was also just fiction. What’s really happening as I write this:
a digital camera is resting silently on an anthology of Romantic
poetry. (p. 29)
And so on. Despite and because of the best efforts of this cheesy ‘authenti-
cating device’ (p. 33), ecomimesis ‘cannot achieve escape velocity from
writing itself’ (p. 30). The uncomfortably close readings Morton develops
in support of this argument—especially of David Abram’s popular work of
ecophenomenological piety The Spell of the Sensuous (Vintage [1997])—are
always deft and demanding, but cannot prevent the critique of ecomimesis
becoming tediously repetitive, routinely schematic qua deconstruction, and
largely unfair to recent ecocritical practice.
The fact is that the question of mimesis has been a central argument in
ecocriticism from the outset. Dana Phillips launched an invigoratingly savage
attack on crude mimeticism—and Abram—in The Truth of Ecology, which
prompted a response of tremendous subtlety and discrimination from
Lawrence Buell in his chapter ‘The World, the Text, and the Ecocritic’ in
12 | Ecocriticism
The Future of Environmental Criticism (Blackwell [2005]). While it would be

unreasonable to expect Buell’s discussion of the productive multivalence of
ecocritical treatment of mimesis to be definitive, one might expect Morton
to mention it given how often he tells us what ‘ecocriticism needs to do’
from now on. As Richard Rorty long ago noticed, deconstruction always
needs a ‘straight guy’ whose naı̈vely dualistic assumptions it can expose,
while fatalistically proclaiming its own subjection to them. Morton’s straight
guy is ecomimeticism (and he warns against hoping for any ‘new and im-
proved’ version from Ecology without Nature) but even Abram confronts the
‘more nature—more writing’ paradox, to say nothing of most academic
ecocritics. For example, Morton claims that Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County

Almanac tries to ‘escape the pull of the literary’ (p. 31), yet it is conspicu-
ously a ‘harvest of culture’, with its self-consciously aestheticizing
river-painting, its scent-poem, its crane-story and so on. In contrast, Kent
Ryden’s ingenious analysis of Leopold’s use of ‘textual metaphor’ (Isle
15:i[2008]) shows that it ‘casts nature and natural systems in the role of
author while placing humans in the position of incompetent readers’ (p. 3),
at least temporarily and analogically. If we conceptualize reading not as a skill
but as a ‘set of social relationships’ that reflect and confer power and pres-
tige, Ryden suggests, A Sand County Almanac imaginatively reconfigures the
usual hierarchy with humans at the bottom as semi-literate consumers. (To
point this out, though, is presumably to chuck Leopold out of the frying pan
of naı̈ve mimeticism into the fire of aesthetic consumerism, thanks to the
‘heads I win, tails you lose’ anti-logic of deconstruction.) Likewise, the view
that popular constructions of nature might be incompatible with ecology is
not a surprise or rebuke to ecocriticism; it is ecocriticism, albeit that critics
of different stripes have adopted less or more sceptical versions of it.
Admittedly, Morton’s critique of ecomimesis is mixed up in a larger,
much more nebulous argument about ‘ambience’, but after two painful
readings I finished up still having little notion what it meant. The really
clear and distinct idea, from a book that reclaims Descartes as an ‘ambient’
philosopher, is that ecocriticism should not only critique but reject ‘nature’
in the name of ecology—although it also concedes that any such wholesale
rejection is almost inconceivable.
Far too often, for all its sporadically gleaming virtues, Ecology without
Nature is unforgivably obscure, tendentious, unfair or even just inaccurate.
We are told, for example, that ‘The lawn expresses the disappearing of the
worker that resulted in picturesque landscape, the production of distance, of
simulated fusions of tameness and wildness, and fascinating points of view’
(p. 89), an essential insight of pastoral criticism traceable to Raymond
Ecocriticism | 13
Williams. Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia estate ‘hid a plantation full of slaves’,

of course, and even now the ‘Monticello Web site persists in describing
activity without actors’ (p. 90). Really? Well, no, actually: Morton’s own
quotation mentions numerous workers, while the Monticello site includes
(rightly and predictably) plentiful material on the slaves that used to live
there.
Morton’s relations with the ecocritical community are cordial and
collegiate, but Ecology without Nature is not directed at practicing ecocritics,
for all its reproving and improving rhetoric. Rather, its markets are fu-
ture postgraduates and currently sceptical theorists from other schools
who may sense their moment passing. Thus Hegel is cited twice as often

as all the major ecocritical writers put together, to say nothing of Derrida,
Agamben and the rest of the Continental pantheon. The barrage of ecocri-
tical neologisms (‘the timbral’, ‘medial’, ‘ambient poetics’, ‘sinthome’,
‘ecomimesis’, ‘dark ecology’, etc.) comes to seem akin to the way biotech
companies mass-produce speculative Intellectual Property claims, hoping
that one will provide a return. (For the record, my money is on ‘dark
ecology’.) In fact, given the way that its central argument involves ignoring
indigenous arguments about mimesis ecocritics have been having for years,
while refining and rebranding them as ‘ecocritique’ of ‘ecomimesis’, the
book’s approach is ironically reminiscent of Vandana Shiva’s notion (cited
by Morton) of ‘biopiracy’, in which Western biotech companies appropriate,
refine and market the folk medicines of the poor. One early sign of his
success in this project (which, it goes without saying, is intellectually and
morally rigorous, and nothing like plagiarism) is that Slavoj Žižek has praised
its insight into modern environmentalism in In Defence of Lost Causes (Verso
[2008]), albeit on the same page as a tribute to Michael Crichton’s absurd
novel of climate change scepticism, A State of Fear.
Ecology without Nature is already beginning to reshape the landscape of
ecocriticism, and, to a degree, deserves to: its reading of Edward Thomas’s
‘Adlestrop’ is splendidly illuminating and attentive, while its preference for
Gothic dark ecology, which tries to ‘love the disgusting, inert, and mean-
ingless’ as against the ‘hale and hearty’ neo-Puritanism of ecocritical normal
science, is winningly conveyed (p. 195). Morton’s ethic of estrangement
coincides powerfully and, one hopes, productively, with the anti-identitarian
(or centrifugal) ecocriticisms developed by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands,
Ursula Heise and others. One just mourns the spread into ecocriticism of the
‘bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language’ (Ludwig
Wittgenstein) that is deconstruction, and wishes that, were it unavoidable,
bewitchment might be a little more enjoyable.
14 | Ecocriticism
One indication that Morton’s intervention is not quite as radical as he

hopes is that another terrific essay by Anthony Lioi, ‘Of Swamp Dragons:
Mud, Megalopolis, and Future for Ecocriticism’ proposes his own ‘symbolic
place in ecocriticism for dirt and pollution, an alias or an icon that allows us
to give dirt its due’ (Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and
Practice, ed. Ingram et al., p. 17). Despite Lioi’s best efforts, Susan Griffin’s
Woman and Nature (Harper & Row [1979]) remains a tedious farrago of
ecofeminist carps and pieties leavened only by moments of unconscious
self-parody, but Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands, a parodic ‘wilderness
adventure’ at the edges of urban New Jersey, provides an ideal illustration
of the swamp dragon/dark ecology idea:

Sullivan . . . demands that the Meadowlands be taken as they are, or
not at all . . . Though he is disgusted by the Meadowlands, he does not
turn away; though his fear is justified, it does not drive him out.
Persisting until it finds a hidden loveliness, Sullivan’s parody turns in
on itself to become a real adventure and revelation . . . a serpentine
wisdom. (pp. 31–2)
If Lioi’s clear and elegant prose has its just deserts, though, it will be his
formulation of the representational ethics of dirtiness that will win out:
‘Impure and defiled, both literally and figuratively, the swamp dragon is
uncharismatic but still alive, an ecstatic identification with a beleaguered
cosmos. It prevents the idealization of nature or culture and thereby
avoids traditional dualism and its reversal’ (p. 32). Ecomimesis already
is—not what it used (or Morton uses it) to be; while wilderness epiphany
no doubt lurks in some corners, nature writing is capable of demonstrating a
sophistication (a certain urbanity in both senses?) and self-consciousness that
is arguably only the authentically Thoreauvian thing itself.
Another fine example of ecocriticism ‘against nature’ is Heather
Sullivan’s baroquely titled ‘The Dangerous Quest for Nature Narratives in
Goethe’s Werther: A Reading of the Ruptured Monologue and the Ruptured
Body’ (Isle 14:ii[2007]). Sullivan’s arch and bemused prose at first indulges,
then arrests, with forensic accuracy, the torrential force of Goethe’s roman-
ticism: ‘The epistolary function of Werther simultaneously performs and
questions through its production of letters the challenges of ‘‘writing
nature’’ (a quest engaging the debates of ‘‘realism’’, ‘‘mimesis’’, ‘‘represen-
tation’’, ‘‘construction’’ and ‘‘mediation’’)’ (p. 3). Goethe, Sullivan argues,
contends with the problem of ecomimesis without resolution or success, but
then sidesteps it neatly by means of the energetic juxtaposition of multiple
perspectives, of ‘mediated immediacy’ (Edgar Landgraf). She handles the
Ecocriticism | 15
narrative’s ‘disturbing energy’ (p. 15) with careful precision, like a highly
experienced paediatric psychiatrist with a tempestuous child. Already in
Goethe, she claims, we can read a critique of the problem of ‘writing
nature’ in that ‘[t]he transitions from passion to agony, immersion to suicide,
delusions of unmediated textual connection to recognition of our inevitably
mediated accounts, from wet dream to editorial interruption, epistolary to
mixed styles—these ‘‘elusive sutures’’—are the dynamic core of the text’
(p. 15). The critique of ecomimesis is there in its very romantic origins—
a point with which Morton would no doubt concur.
David Mazel, who can always be relied upon for brilliant insights
economically delivered, exposes in ‘Annie Dillard and the Book of Job:

Notes Toward a Postnatural Ecocriticism’ (Ingram et al.) the internal
tensions between biosurveillance and epiphany in a nature writing classic,
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper’s Magazine Press [1974]). Dillard’s determin-
ation to derive a theodicy from observations of nature inspires rhapsodies of
natural exuberance and variety, and yet, Mazel shows, these are perpetually
disrupted by her helpless participation in the Panopticon of scientific sur-
veillance of the biosphere. Learning to stalk animals, ‘her hope is to find
God, but what really happens is that she becomes a minor functionary of the
Global Biosurveillance Regime, doing her bit to render nature’s remaining
opacities transparent and thereby destroying the very basis of her
natural-theological project’ (p. 192). It is not that any environmental
critic, even Patrick Curry, could deny the necessity of the Foucauldian
‘environmentality’ produced by this scientific Panopticon—either the know-
ledge or the juridico-disciplinary regimes that follow from it—only that we
need now to question the complicity and fracturing of the subject of such
nature writing.
There is a great deal more that might be reviewed under the rubric
‘Against Nature’: the advent of queer ecology, animal studies and the con-
tinuing development of posthumanist thought most conspicuously. For in-
stance, Cary Wolfe’s demanding Earthographies essay, ‘Learning from Temple
Grandin, or, Animal Studies, Disability Studies, and Who Comes After the
Subject’ interrogates the intersection of disability—Grandin is autistic, and
says she ‘thinks in pictures’ rather than words—and animal studies—
Grandin is also a highly successful animal behaviour expert who has trans-
formed the slaughter practices of hundreds of American abattoirs. Whereas
the visuality of neurotypical people is continually subject to verbal over-
shadowing that shapes perception according to expectation, Grandin argues
that her own visuality is at once closer to other animals and more like a video
camera. As Wolfe argues, her argument subverts the identification of vision
16 | Ecocriticism
with conceptual and practical mastery, and furthermore swipes it out from
under the ‘able’ human: ‘In Grandin’s story, in other words, visuality may be
animal, it may be technical, but it is anything but ‘human’—and that all the
more so, paradoxically enough, for being so ‘‘accurate’’ and acute’ (p. 113).
The basic insight of disability studies—that ‘disability’ may under certain
circumstances be ‘a powerful and unique form of abled-ness’ (p. 117) ar-
ticulates with the argument in animal studies (put forward by Grandin her-
self, too, in Animals in Translation (Bloomsbury. [2005])) that, contra animal
rights discourse, animals should not be represented or valued as humans
manqué, but rather in terms of a range of differentiations and unique virtues.

As Derrida puts it, ‘there is not one opposition between man and non-man;
there are, between different organizational structures of the living being,
many fractures, heterogeneities’ (quoted p. 120). From an evolutionary
perspective, though, it is worth pointing out the patterns of genetic and
morphological kinship that constitute these ‘fractures’. Animal studies, too, is
close kin with ecocriticism with some limited heterogeneities; Wolfe makes a
powerful case for combining both perspectives with disability studies,
charged as it is with thinking about humans that, in certain times and
places, are equally considered in- or nonhuman.
In terms of the contrast Kate Soper develops in her seminal What is
Nature? (Blackwell. [1998]), ecocriticism is in the process of shifting from
a predominantly ‘nature-endorsing’ position to a ‘nature-sceptical’ one. In
the process, it is proving more capable of forging productive alliances with
theoretical positions (notably queer theory, feminism and deconstruction)
that have historically been suspicious of the oppressively normative potential
of ‘nature’. Ecology without Nature positions itself at the forefront of that
movement, although many of its key claims have been simultaneously or
previously discovered, and more accessibly explained. What remains to be
seen in this shift is whether the gains in theoretical sophistication, interpret-
ive subtlety and—one suspects—institutional acceptance outweigh the pos-
sible loss of the simple normative force, affective immediacy, historical depth
and complexity of nature and wilderness.
4. Ecological Materialism: Approaches Founded in

Marxism or Science
Back in the 1980s, when High Theory was approaching its zenith, Raymond
Williams would apparently become irritated with fellow Marxists who could
Ecocriticism | 17
only cite ‘nature’ in prophylactic scare quotes, so certain were they of its
wholly socially constructed, reactionary character. Why not ‘nation’, or
indeed ‘class’? Williams was then posthumously adopted as the UK’s first
ecocritic by Dominic Head, and became a pivotal figure in a humanistic red–
green tradition that runs from William Morris through John Berger to, in
contemporary criticism, Martin Ryle and Kate Soper. John Parham’s
Earthographies essay ‘The Poverty of Ecocritical Theory: E.P. Thompson
and the British Perspective’ adds another name to this list, arguing that
the Marxist historian’s ‘model of flexible theoretical constructions responsive
and adaptable to empirical knowledge offers a useful blueprint to ecocritical
theory’ (p. 27). Moreover, while Parham admits Jonathan Bate’s The Song of

the Earth (Picador [2000]) possesses unusual ‘theoretical sophistication’ for an
ecocritical text, he suggests that it represents a pessimistic and impoverished
vision of the possibilities of romanticism. Thompson’s work on William
Morris, Parham suggests, demonstrates ‘how a ‘‘pre-political’’ consciousness
shaped by romanticism might nourish a humanist, ecological socialism’ and
therefore a ‘new, more pragmatic direction for ecocritical theory’ (p. 32).
While Parham’s green socialism tends to highlight the community-focused
limitations of its American cousin, the environmental justice movement,
though, its own argument is compromised by the complex political valence
of modern environmentalism: far from being a- or suprapolitical as some
Greens have asserted, environmental politics questions at once the anthropo-
centric bias of conventional delineations of ‘the polis’ and the capacity of
existing structures to deliver change on appropriate temporal and economic
scales. It is more problematic than Parham indicates to delineate a specifically
left environmentalism, therefore.
One of the enduring political difficulties for environmentalism is its
seeming inability to offer the kind of liberation provided by feminism,
anti-racism, LGBT activism and even animal rights; it seems a discourse of
scarcity, constraint, even Puritanism, promising only a ‘lifelong celery diet’
(Paul Hawken). Kate Soper’s ‘Alternative Hedonism, Cultural Theory and
the Role of Aesthetic Revisioning’ (CulS 22:v[2008]) argues that green so-
cialists need to develop a counter-culture of pleasures capable of challenging
unsustainable consumerism. Whereas left thought had previously appealed to
the collective self-interest of the dispossessed, it now ought also to elicit and
inform the dissatisfaction of the affluent, locating the constituency of the
‘disillusioned seduced’ (Zygmunt Bauman). While Soper’s analysis recon-
firms the importance of Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, it resists the
traditional ‘scientific’ Marxist definition of ‘true’ vs ‘false’ needs in favour of
attention to the subjectively experienced points of dialectical tension in
18 | Ecocriticism
consumer culture. For example, while Soper does not glibly dismiss the
narcissistic pleasures of commodity consumption, she notes how frequently
simpler pleasures such as walking, cycling and convivial eating are at once
rendered impossible by contemporary economic and ecological conditions
(fear of crime, traffic, the demands of work) and displaced into more highly
mediated, resource-intensive and expensive locations such gyms and restaur-
ants. While she admits the minority character of both the disillusionment and
the more sustainable alternatives that might channel it, her argument is,
notwithstanding its understandable caution, inspirational. She is unafraid to
get down and dirty amid the minutiae of contemporary consumerism, whilst
simultaneously providing a progressive role for aesthetic refashioning of

tastes and assumptions: ‘An important aspect of [an altered] . . . gestalt
would . . . be an aesthetic suspension and reordering whereby the commod-
ities once perceived as enticingly glamorous come gradually instead to be
seen as cumbersome and ugly in virtue of their association with unsustainable
resource use, noise, toxicity or their legacy of unrecyclable waste’ (p. 580).
It remains to be seen whether financial crisis and recession tends more to
sharpen the dissatisfactions of the ‘seduced’ or to focus minds upon making
up ‘lost’ economic growth.
A more comprehensive materialist approach to green cultural studies is
indicated by Adrian Ivakhiv’s ‘Green Film Criticism and its Futures’ (Isle
15:ii[2008]). The essay offers a useful survey of the current state of what
Ivakhiv hopes to call ‘eco-cinecriticism’, which in truth has tended to be a
minority interest within the field despite the far wider cultural currency of
visual media compared to print. Having outlined the thematizing limitations
of some of the major contributions to date—notably Jhan Hochman’s Green
Cultural Studies (UIdahoP. [1998]), David Ingram’s Green Screen (UExeP.
[2000]) and Sean Cubbitt’s EcoMedia (Rodopi. [2005])—Ivakhiv proposes
that eco-cinecriticism (it’ll never take off . . .) found itself upon the ‘cultural
circulation’ model of the Birmingham School of cultural studies, which
demands combined analysis of the production, consumption and reproduc-
tion phases of film production. The critic would be interested in the inten-
tions of writers and directors, a film’s effects (empirically ascertained if
possible) and its environmental costs; as Ivakhiv points out, ‘[t]he process
of filmmaking has noticeable and sometimes powerful effects on the people,
animals, and places in which it occurs, both in real terms as the production
process occurs, and in its mediated effects’ (p. 22). Certainly ecocritics have
shown too little interest in the ecological means of production, distribution,
consumption and disposal of cultural artefacts—books as well as films—and
almost no interest in subjecting our assertions about their possible impact on
Ecocriticism | 19
environmental behaviour to empirical test. Humanities research tends to be

poorly funded and academics untrained in such gathering such evidence, of
course, and admirable as Ivakhiv’s proposal certainly is, every film would
seem to require a vast collaborative effort, which would have its own eco-
logical and economic resource implications. Even so, a handful of case
studies of quality might have a highly salutary effect, as ecocritics more
generally felt the need to subject their theoretical claims to the modifying
and qualifying effect of empirical evidence, much like the ‘dialogue’ of fact
and theory recommended by E.P. Thompson in The Poverty of Theory (Merlin
Press [1978]). Speaking of impoverished theories, an aside: Ivakhiv’s bracing
empiricism sits uneasily with his concluding recommendation of psycho-

analysis as a resource for eco-cinecritical thought, given its status as one
of the most thoroughly empirically refuted theories of modern times.
Residual obeisance to the Old Gods is also one of the few faults in the
most exciting collection of essays reviewed in this period: Material Feminisms,
edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman. While many of the contributions
lie outside our purview, the essays by Nancy Tuana, Catriona Mortimer-
Sandilands and Alaimo herself should redefine the place of ecological thought
among feminisms in general. Mortimer-Sandilands aptly titled The Good-
Natured Feminist (UMinnP [1999]) began the process of coaxing ecofeminism
away from its Earth Mother origins, and attempted to circumvent the endless
futile shuttling between essentialist and constructionist versions. These
essays, though, are still more ambitious, engaging directly, critically and
productively with the sciences of nature. As Alaimo and Hekman’s intro-
duction states:
Focusing exclusively on representations, ideology, and discourse
excludes lived experience, corporeal practice, and biological sub-
stance from consideration. It makes it nearly impossible for feminism
to engage with medicine or science in innovative, productive, or
affirmative ways—the only path available is the well-worn path of
critique. (p. 4)
For wholly sound historical reasons, feminism has tended to be highly
nature-sceptical, but as Material Feminisms indicates this reflects a false (and
largely unexamined) dichotomy between the supposedly labile,
non-deterministic and complex space of ‘culture’ and the simple, determin-
istic gender/sexual essences prescribed by ‘nature’. Yet, ‘[f]or these theor-
ists, nature ‘‘punches back’’ at humans and the machines they construct to
explore it in ways that we cannot predict’ (p. 7). This perspective not only
offers to reconstruct feminist theory, it also addresses the ethical impasse of
20 | Ecocriticism
cultural relativism and opens up mutually informing lines of communication

with the natural sciences. And, as a teacher of gender theory, I would suggest
it promises a more pedagogically effective version of feminism: my students
seldom believe that gender is a (only) social construct, but since the theory
spurns the terrain of ‘biology’ the crudest kinds of essentialism can continue
to populate it unmolested.
Tuana’s essay, ‘Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina’, brilliantly illus-
trates how, in the contemporary environmental arena, ‘the knowledge that
is too often missing and is often desperately needed is at the intersection
between things and people, between feats of engineering and social struc-

tures, between experiences and bodies’ (p. 189). While the usefulness of the
term ‘viscous porosity’ is open to challenge, Tuana deploys the idea of
‘emergent interplay’ to excellent effect, evoking the truly forbidding com-
plexity of the interactions of ‘biology’ and ‘culture’—really multiple levels of
causation and emergence within these misleadingly monolithic constructs—
that need to be understood in a meaningful account of the Katrina event. As
a beginning: the history—long predating the Army Corps of Engineers—of
human ecological transformation of the Mississippi delta region; the political,
racial and engineering story of the levée system; the invisibility of disability
and the shaming visibility of race in the representation of ‘victims’; the
meteorology of hurricanes and its contested relationship to climate
change; and the lethal inculcation of ignorance of both racial poverty and
ecological reality in the American public. Tuana correctly identifies the
revolutionary nature of her interactionist approach, and we might also
note, simply, how much more difficult it is likely to be in practice, given
how biophobic anti-essentialism reassuringly minimizes the variables.
Nevertheless, there may be trouble ahead; take this claim:
Interactionism not only allows but compels us to speak of the
biological aspects of phenomena without importing the mistaken
notion that this biological component exists somehow independent of,
or prior to, cultures and environments. It serves as witness to the
materiality of the social and the agency of the natural. (p. 210, italics
mine)
Such is the price of a passport out of the razor-wired desmesne of feminist
anti-essentialism, perhaps. But a properly interactionist account would not
conclude in advance that biological or cultural factors could not be considered
as, so to speak, first causes. Primate evolution, for example, certainly did
happen ‘prior to’ human culture—albeit that whatever effects that history
Ecocriticism | 21
might now have on our morphology and behaviour cannot be specified

‘independent of’ the cultures in which we now make ourselves.
Alaimo’s ‘Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature’
is, in contrast, a more theoretical piece that ranges widely over the inter-
sections of the new material feminism and fields such as food and disability
studies. Since ‘transcorporeality’ appears synonymous with ‘emergent inter-
play’, it would seem we have not yet learned terminological economy and
consistency from scientists. Even so, Alaimo deserves applause not only for
pointing out that ‘it is crucial that feminists invoke a counter-biology to aid
our struggles’ against popular biological essentialism (p. 241), but also for
showing how it might be done. Somewhat like Plumwood’s materialist spir-

ituality, Alaimo’s trans-corporeality seeks to incorporate other-than-human
agency, with the proviso that it ‘need not be predicated upon a humanist
model of the free individual’ (p. 246). She is even able to mount a brave and
convincing defence of the ‘wild’, which has been subjected to stringent
critique ever since William Cronon’s Uncommon Ground collection (Norton
[1996]): ‘Wildness may well be defined as nature’s ongoing, material-
semiotic intra-actions—actions that may well surprise, annoy, terrify, or
baffle humans, but that nonetheless are valued by environmentalists as the
very stuff of life itself’ (p. 249). There are effective anecdotes too: the way
in which disability operates at the boundary of recalcitrant flesh and discrim-
inatory societies, or that tomato-growing might disclose the co-implication
of our bodies, our agricultural discourses and dirt. The only disappointment
is that Alaimo still feels the need to engage with such absurdly biophobic
‘authorities’ as Judith Butler, even critically. It is reminiscent of when British
fans of Continental philosophy befuddled Emmanuel Levinas by asking
whether animals had ‘faces’ in the requisite sense; he had clearly never
considered it before. The truth is that the Old Gods—Freud, Lacan,
Butler, probably Derrida, though not perhaps Foucault—are like Thor and
his fellow divinities in Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency,
destined now for immortal irrelevance. The message to Alaimo and col-
leagues should be: you are your own theorists; you are the vanguard. You
already know more than the Old Gods knew, and it is to you critics ought to
defer.
Perhaps most deserving of such admiration is Catriona Mortimer-
Sandilands, whose narrative essay ‘Landscape, Memory, and Forgetting:
Thinking Through (My Mother’s) Body and Place’ exhibits a quite extraor-
dinary balance of delicacy and rigour. While some of Mortimer-Sandilands’s
other writing is rather stylistically arid and theoretically over-committed to
orthodox anti-orthodoxy under the ‘queer’ rubric (see, for example,
22 | Ecocriticism
‘Queering Ecocultural Studies’, CulS 22:iii[2008]), this is a beautiful work of

literary scholarship. The autobiographical element—italicized and dated—
concerns a period in which the author’s mother is diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s disease, and begins to learn to adapt to her condition;
the theoretical and critical elements stitched into it are about the phenom-
enology of place and memory, and Jane Urquhart’s novel A Map of
Glass (McClelland & Stewart [2005]). A disease that, conspicuously and
horribly, appears to eliminate individuality is understood, in Mortimer-
Sandilands’s account, in its utter particularity: her mother’s condition is
conveyed vividly but with apt discretion, while her analysis shows
how ‘embodiment is intertwined with relationships between and among

reflection, perceptual experience, and landscape’ (p. 271). As the disease
gradually eliminates the capacity to form memories, and then existing
‘episodic’ and ‘semantic’ memories (what happened and what you know),
familiar movements and lived topographies remain. As Mortimer-
Sandilands puts it, ‘[o]ne can dance beautifully with a beloved person that
one now no longer recognizes even faintly’ (p. 272), and although the
socially valued aspects of personality are annihilated, unreflective, largely
inarticulate pleasure in the landscape engraved upon the mind remains. The
most startling insight follows from an account of the neurological reality of
memory:
I find this idea quite extraordinarily beautiful: in the act of
remembering something, the world is, quite literally, written into our
brain structure. And memory allows the body to greet the world with
greater physical ease the more often we have a particular sensory
experience. . . . [T]his account is of a meeting between embodied
mind and active world that must include not only physical experience
but social relationships . . . (Indeed, a dominant social relationship
would be, literally, more clearly inscribed in the brain and more
amenable to a strong memory: hegemony is physical.) (p. 273)
That last, parenthetical phrase might come to stand synecdochically for the
project of Material Feminisms at its best: ‘hegemony is physical’. It at once
extends the potential reach of discourse to the neurological level, and indi-
cates its limits: as the ‘plaques and tangles’ of Alzheimer’s destroy the pa-
tient’s capacity for language and its distinctive form of selfhood, what remains
is not a ‘deeper’ but a different, kinaesthetic/topophilic self. Mortimer-
Sandilands takes nothing away from the tragedy of degenerative illness, but
imbues it with two kinds of dignity: the kind that comes with the recognition
Ecocriticism | 23
of particularity precisely where its erasure seems most certain, and the kind,
proper to intellectual life, of deriving from the evanescent human moment a
larger truth about the future of knowledge in the humanities.
Meanwhile, in Europe, a further alternative species of materialism is
calving, under the heading of ‘biosemiotics’. It has a significant pedigree
in biology, notably in Scandinavia and the Baltic region where Jakob von
Uexküll (b. 1944) has inspired several schools of semioticians to study life
processes in general as sign-systems. For example, cells can be seen as
regulated by both digital (DNA) and analogue (say, biochemical concentra-
tion gradient) information. A multicellular organism, too, interacts with the

‘objects’ of its subjective world, or Umwelt, as a web of meaningful partici-
pants, and ecosystems circulate signs as well as substances—or substances as
signs. Wendy Wheeler’s The Whole Creature (L&W. [2006]), the sole substan-
tial attempt to consider the ramifications of biosemiotics for ecocriticism,
splices it together with evolutionary-developmental biology (or ‘evo-devo’)
as a counter to what she sees—in common with many humanities scholars—
as reductive, ideologically charged neo-Darwinism. Wheeler’s contribution
to Earthographies, ‘Postscript on Biosemiotics: Reading Beyond Words—and
Ecocriticism’, is less marred by such axe-grinding and more focused on the
hope that the new perspective might help us to square our commitments ‘to
some form of scientific realism, to a strong sense that the human and
non-human world matters in ways which are commonly experienced by
most human beings [and] all the insights afforded by ‘‘critiques of the subject
and the sign’’’ (p. 138). Ecocritics have long realized that their most trouble-
some and vital theoretical commitment is to some revision of the ‘linguistic
turn’—either through some form of ‘dual accountability’ to the semiotic and
the referential (Lawrence Buell), or a phenomenological redescription of
language as itself ‘embodied’ (David Abram) or ‘wild’ (Gary Snyder).
Biosemiotics might offer a scientifically respectable escape route from the
prison-house of (human) language, which it resituates within a more com-
prehensive ‘semiosphere’, as Wheeler indicates:
Environments . . . are always semiotic environments. The Umwelt of
the tick is a very limited semiotic environment; the Umwelt of the
human is correspondingly very extensive. The biosphere overall can
be thought of as the semiosphere, and the evolution of species and
their Umwelten can be thought of, as Jesper Hoffmeyer has suggested,
as the evolution of ever greater extents of ‘semiotic freedom’.
(pp. 140–1)
24 | Ecocriticism
What Wheeler describes—in moderately thrilling terms, it should

be said—as a layering of emergent semiotic systems sounds actually
very similar to what the alleged ‘reductionist’ biologist E.O. Wilson
(vilified for inventing ‘sociobiology’) calls ‘consilience’, or what his
supposed opponent Steven Rose has described as epistemological diversity
(i.e. relatively autonomous disciplinary discourses) within ontological unity
(i.e. materialism). At the most, Wheeler’s account differs in tone and
emphasis:
Any system capable of response (whether physical, chemical, or
nervous) is engaged in something semiotic, and the constraints upon

interpretation simply [sic!] chart the path from mathematical con-
straints in physics, through chemical constraints and catalysers in
chemistry, to the more open interpretations possible in the evolution
of biological systems. Each level produces, through re-entry and
consequent complexification of semiosis [i.e. recursivity], the greater
semiotic, evolutionary and interpretative, possibilities of the next.
(p. 141)
It is perhaps unsurprising given this prospectus that Wheeler’s brief
exploration of the implications of her view for cultural criticism seems
wholly inadequate. Even if we accept that literature, for example, constitutes
part of an ‘emergent’ layer of semiosis, its articulation with ‘lower’ layers
seems, at this stage, radically underspecified—and, in reality, massively
overdetermined. Are there, for example, evolutionary or genetic constraints
upon semiosmic process, as some Darwinian critics allege? Are literary
works meant only to exemplify such emergence, or shall they be
praised—as Wheeler seems to praise Wordsworth—for having
some more or less conscious awareness of it? Even to be asking these ques-
tions, nevertheless, and to have available the answers suggested by biose-
miotics, is a step of tremendous significance for the environmental
humanities.
There are numerous pitfalls in the way of the materialist project, not the
least of which are some of the theoretically compulsory, professionally re-
warded mental tics (overwhelming confirmation bias in favour of evidence of
biological ‘subversion’ rather than ‘conservation’, ‘symbiosis’ over ‘compe-
tition’, ‘rhizome’ over ‘taproot’, for example, and uncontrolled prolifer-
ation of jargon) that tend to distinguish the humanities from the sciences.
Such caveats notwithstanding, these developments presage ecocriticisms that
are, at last, properly materialist and ecological, which was, for some, the
original promise.
Ecocriticism | 25
5. Globality/Postcoloniality: Approaches Founded in

Marxism or Science
If early ecocriticism was largely nature-endorsing and centripetally com-
mitted to bioregional conceptions of place, its canon was also bounded,
for the most part, by the coastlines of North America and the British Isles
(mea culpa). The globalization of ecocriticism, nevertheless, is a development
universally welcomed (and promoted, in its early phases, most prominently
by Patrick D. Murphy’s Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook
(Routledge [1998])). One form considers the representation of globality as
such, attempting to articulate a new ecocritical paradigm, while the other—

proliferating dramatically but without a definitive textual expression in this
period—sees the interaction of ecocriticism and postcolonialism (or, inev-
itably, like some monster of the Canadian Shield, ‘eco-poco’).
Richard Kerridge’s ‘Climate Change and Contemporary Modernist
Poetry’ in Lopez and Caleshu’s Poetry and Public Language seems, rather sur-
prisingly, to be the first article in print on the urgent question of the role of
ecocriticism in averting an immense global environmental threat (though see
also Slovic, pp. 117–33). It will be a hard act to follow, not least because it
pinpoints so precisely the nature of the quandaries involved, primarily the
baffling and disastrous disconnection between cognitive awareness of climate
change and the generally insignificant alterations in lifestyle we seem pre-
pared to countenance. Understanding this as a problem of representation,
rather than, say, inertia, moral weakness or institutional / technological
barriers, Kerridge observes:
The possible futures it presents us with are so excessive as to break
any chain of personal narrative that might link them with the ex-
perience we have now. Ecological crisis poses a similar narrative
problem to the representation of nuclear war and its aftermath: any
sensibility that could be in a position to narrate these events would be
so transformed by them as to be unintelligible to us back here where
it hasn’t yet happened. (p. 132)
On this basis we might distinguish between Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker
(Bloomsbury [1980]), which registers the rupture of nuclear war in the very
language of the narration, from the entropic scenario—amplified with can-
nibalism, ashy rain and a relentless flinty despair—and sadistic neutrality of
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (Picador [2006]). The latter, we might say,
wants to enjoy the perverse thrill of the aftermath, but refuses to consider its
meaning.
26 | Ecocriticism
Kerridge’s analysis departs from the premise that the neo-Modernist

poetry of J.H. Prynne and Tony Lopez ‘has specific equipment for reaching
into this [gap], as writing that keeps to the personal voice and the conven-
tionally poetic has not’ (p. 133). His detailed readings bear out the case that
Prynne and Lopez’s poetics ‘produce an insistence on seeing one’s environ-
mentalism itself as quasi-material and part of a larger economy, so that one
has to face the question of the niche one’s own views and feelings occupy.
What shelters them, and what do they feed on?’ (p. 143) Though Kerridge
does not exemplify the contrast here, it could be argued that the coherent
lyric subject of ecological elegy and jeremiad (plentifully represented in Neil
Astley’s anthology of ‘eco-poems’, Earth Shattering (Bloodaxe [2007]))

implies precisely the ‘autonomy and sheltered space’ (p. 146) we have
identified as problematic. Neo-Modernist poets force us to live, consciously,
in the gap between knowledge and action that we would prefer to ignore:
‘[t]hey hold us, and themselves, very firmly there, because we don’t need to
be told what to do. We know, and these poets refuse to let us pretend
otherwise’ (p. 147). It is no doubt unavoidable, though also unfair, that an
essay on incommensurability invites reflection on the vast disparity between
the audience for British neo-Modernist poetry (is it less or more than the
readership of ecocriticism?) and the scale of response needed to respond
effectively to climate change, between poem and planet. Kerridge’s elo-
quence and attentive reading habits, at any rate, are worthy of emulation
as further research in this area proceeds apace; in the UK, the stated
priorities of humanities funding bodies, if not personal conviction, will
ensure its rapid proliferation.
Besides Ecology without Nature and Material Feminisms, the third contender
for paradigm-shifter in the review period is Ursula Heise’s Sense of Place and
Sense of Planet. Having endeared itself by starting with Douglas Adams’s The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), the book proceeds to bring ecocriti-
cism into sharper contact than hitherto with the various critiques of identity
proposed by globalization theory. The main target here is the mainstream
emphasis on the role of ‘place’ in potentially anchoring subjects in ecologic-
ally distinctive ‘bioregions’. Whilst never ‘denying that under certain cir-
cumstances . . . affirmations of local ties can play an important role in
environmentalist struggles’ (p. 10), Heise evinces the meanings, causes
and implications of ‘deterritorialization’, and promotes an idea of ‘eco-cos-
mopolitanism’ that is critically aligned with it. For one thing it is, she argues,
not indigeneity but affluence and education that foster bioregional resistance
and belonging, and for another the association of environmentalism and place
can be seen as a specific, historically conditioned American response to
Ecocriticism | 27
modernity that is little understood elsewhere. ‘Place’ embodies the fantasy

of a spontaneous, non-violent, purely ethical end to the conflict of diverse
priorities and values, just as the bioregion promises to resolve rival claims to
territory and resources in a naturalized politico-ecological identity. As Heise
puts it, with admirable restraint, the ‘central [bioregionalist] idea, that the
ecologically right course of action will impose itself as the obvious one at the
local but not the larger levels of scale, may seem something short of com-
pelling to anyone who has ever engaged in local politics’ (p. 35). Indeed, we
might suggest that it is the very sense of mutual dependence that should
characterize a bioregion that would motivate competition over its resources.

Fundamentally, Heise’s critique is levelled at the reflexive privileging of
the local as against other, larger levels of environmental cognition and action;
as she says (and I recognize my students here), ‘the local itself is thoroughly
unfamiliar to many individuals, and may be epistemologically as unfathom-
able in its entirety as larger entities such as the nation or the globe’ (p. 41).
As a result, she claims, ecocriticism has found it hard to think globally, but
also unable only to act locally. Drawing extensively upon cultural geography,
Heise rejects the ‘ethic of proximity’ (Zygmunt Bauman), which assumes we
can only care for what is almost tangibly nearby, in favour of global citizen-
ship: ‘what is crucial for ecological awareness . . . is not so much a sense of
place as a sense of planet—a sense of how political, economic, technological,
social, cultural, and ecological networks shape daily routines’ (p. 55). So in
addition to direct experience of ‘local’ nature and the next best thing,
rhapsodic nature writing, ‘an eco-cosmopolitan approach should also value
the abstract and highly mediated kinds of knowledge and experience that
lend equal or greater support to a grasp of biospheric connectedness’
(p. 62). Part I of the book examines a range of texts for their ‘sense of
planet’, such as the Blue Planet BBC nature documentary, novels of popula-
tion apocalypse and Karen Tei Yamashita’s magic realist novel Through the Arc
of the Rainforest (Coffee House Press [1990]), evaluating not only their evo-
cation of global interconnectedness but also ‘the perception that this whole-
ness encompasses vast heterogeneities’ (p. 64). The Google Earth application,
for example, is seen as a ‘metamorphosis of the Blue Planet image into a
searchable and zoomable database in the shape of a virtual globe’ (p. 67).
There is an intriguing pedagogical thought experiment available in the con-
trast between Kerridge and Heise’s analysis and artefacts: the former would
confront students with the anti-sentiment and resilient strangeness of
neo-Modernist poetry, whereas the latter would encourage them to recog-
nize the cognitive and affective implications of quite familiar but
28 | Ecocriticism
highly mediated ‘environments’. It would make for a fascinating comparative

study.
The other dimension of the ‘eco-cosmopolitan’ is the perception and
representation of environmental risk, a subject much discussed by toxicolo-
gists, environmental policymakers and sociologists—though rather little by
ecocritics. Part II of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet again ranges widely,
surveying the parameters of risk perception as they have been assessed within
various disciplinary paradigms: toxicologists have wanted to quantify and
understand why people consistently fail to understand objective risk accur-
ately, by their lights, while sociologists have tended to stress the ideological
construction of risk—especially along axes of gender, race and class. Heise’s

interest, having explained all this patiently and clearly, is in the way ‘risk
perceptions are generated by and manifest themselves through various forms
of representation, from documentaries and journalism to fiction and poetry’
(p. 138), which among other things implies that ecocriticism might play a
direct and positive role in environmental policymaking as well as promoting
green ethics. It is also, one might add, a project that lies squarely on the
boundary of the empirical, theoretical and critical, much like Nancy Tuana’s
discussion of Katrina. The difference is that Heise’s argument is unencum-
bered by relics of the Old Gods, provides (qua monograph, rather than essay,
if nothing else) a more comprehensive account of the intellectual resources
of eco-cosmopolitanism, and gives a detailed and consistently insightful set of
readings of literary texts that model its hermeneutic.
The eco-poco intersection involves, as Graham Huggan points out in his
essay in Gifford and Becket’s collection ‘Postcolonialism, Ecocriticism and
the Animal in Recent Canadian Fiction’, a renewal rather than a belated
discovery of the ‘inseparability of current crises of ecological mismanage-
ment from historical legacies of imperialistic exploitation and abuse’
(p. 164). While one might quibble with Huggan’s glib dismissal of the
‘Green Revolution’ as ‘cultural arrogance’, as well as his assertion that
both fields remain equally marginalized by conservative English departments,
his calm, condensed appraisal of the ways in which human and animal rep-
resentational ethics might be mutually informing is exemplary. At the centre
of his essay is a critical discussion of two modern ‘beast fables’ by Canadian
authors, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (Penguin [2001]) and Barbara Gowdy’s The
White Bone (Flamingo [1999]), which Huggan uses to highlight the intersec-
tion of questions of anthropomorphism (from animal studies) and postcolo-
nial representations of the ‘other’. Whereas the Indian boy Pi seems to
embody contradictory currents of ‘colonialist nostalgia’ and radically
modern anti-anthropomorphism (p. 171), Huggan argues, the anonymous
Ecocriticism | 29
African elephant poachers who slaughter Gowdy’s ‘She-ones’ (elephants)

seem straightforwardly racist figures of meaningless cruelty and greed.
(Even this, it should be said, seems over-generous to Gowdy’s execrable
novel, courageous though it is in attempting to imagine the intersubjective
lives of other animals.)
Huggan’s encouraging conclusion considers some ‘lessons’ of the
eco-poco encounter, including among them an instant cliché: the ‘corrective’
postcolonial criticism supposedly offers to ‘a variety of explicitly or
implicitly universalist ecological claims’ (p. 176), as if climate change
science is only valid in certain countries. Would not Exxon and the Cato
Institute concur, and welcome that news? Another is the need for attention

to ‘who speaks and for whom . . . particularly in cases where ‘‘othering’’ is
the inadvertent result of an act of well-intentioned political advocacy, or
where the attempt to reach out to one oppressed group runs the risk of
further marginalizing another’ (p. 177). Whilst morally and politically
one would not wish to demur from this requirement, the heart quails
at the thought that ecocritics too might end up embroiled in fruitless argu-
ments over subalternity and who is entitled to hold the conch; nothing is
easier than pointing out some oppression another critic or writer has
‘ignored’, or some subtle ‘appropriation’ they have practiced, and little is
so self-regarding and unprofitable. Moreover, since Huggan’s improving in-
structions always come from postcolonial studies and are addressed to the
naı̈fs of ecocriticism, there seems little incentive for the latter to risk broad-
ening their horizons.
Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson’s substantial anthology African
Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory collects four essays or extracts
on ecocriticism (they make up one of the shortest sections in the volume),
including two important theoretical discussions: William Slaymaker’s
‘Ecoing the Other(s): The Call of Global Green and Black African
Responses’ (2001) and Rob Nixon’s ‘Environmentalism and
Postcolonialism’ (2005). The former is essentially a survey of the absence
of environmental engagement in black African criticism, and a confused
rejection of environmentalism as, possibly, a neo-colonial imposition, suspect
especially because of the enthusiasm of white South Africans for it. ‘Art
d’eco’—Slaymaker’s feeble coinage for environmentalist art about Africa
produced in the West—is summarily dismissed: ‘ecolit and ecocrit are
imperial paradigms of cultural fetishism that misrepresent the varied land-
scapes of sub-Saharan Africa. These misaligned icons of the natural order are
invasive and invalid and should be resisted or ignored’ (p. 685). Like
Morton, Slaymaker simply identifies ecocritics with the cultural artefacts
30 | Ecocriticism
they study, and seems to assume they would be likely to take Gorillas in the
Mist or Born Free as examples of documentary realism. The alternative to
neocolonial ecology, though, is hardly inspirational: ‘while discrediting
global environmentalism’, we are told, critic Larry Lohman ‘opts . . . for
an openness to indeterminate responsibilities in relation to the claims of
the other’ (p. 685). In the face of the depredations of transnational capital
and, in some instances, kleptocratic and ecocidal regimes, the WWF’s uni-
versalism—enacted, nowadays, through national and community partner-
ships—is perhaps preferable to ‘openness to indeterminate
responsibilities’. Bizarrely, Slaymaker then concludes by saying that, in
spite of all that, ‘environmental literature and ecological criticism are a

resonating, dynamic signal generated by concern for the health of the
earth and its resources’ (p. 691). So having attacked ‘western’ scientific
‘objectivity’ (there are no African ecologists, on this view, or else they
work impressionistically), he reverts to the reifying rhetoric of planetary
‘health’ and capitalistic talk of ‘resources’.
Nixon’s argument, in contrast, is cogent and powerfully articulated.
Having identified a significant gap in early ecocriticism—namely, the
whole world outside America—the essay clinically assesses the ‘four main
schisms between the dominant concerns of postcolonialists and ecocritics’
(p. 716): the contrast between ecocritical rhetorics of purity (targeted also
by Heise, Lioi and Morton) and postcolonial hybridity; postcolonial ‘dis-
placement’ versus ecocritical ‘place’; the development of environmental
literature ‘within a national (and often nationalistic) American framework’
(pp. 716–17) as opposed to the postcolonial critique of nationalism; and
postcolonial historicism, as distinct from ‘the pursuit of timeless, solitary
moments of communion with nature’ (p. 717). Once again, it is very clear
who needs to clean up their act. Of bioregionalism, for instance, Nixon
writes: [t]here is much to be said for this approach: it can help to instill in us
an awareness of our impact on our immediate environment, help ground our
sense of responsibility’ (p. 717). It turns out that is all that can be said,
positively, for it; there then follow several pages of (slightly overstated)
lambasting of bioregionalism for its parochialism, racism and ‘spatial am-
nesia’. Nixon goes on, though, to point out how environmentalism is being
‘decentred’ as it is adopted and transformed in the global South (as was
clearly evident at the Copenhagen climate change talks), which he takes as a
challenge to the dreaded universalism but might as easily show how univer-
salist ethics are always, in practice, embedded socially. The most valuable
contribution here, if eco-poco is to avoid a lot of embarrassed shuffling
around this issue, will be real ethnographic evidence, such Eren Zink’s
Ecocriticism | 31
study of the politics of nature in Vietnam’s bird-rich Ba Lat estuary (unpub-

lished ms): he found that Vietnamese and foreign scientists and environmen-
tal activists shared ‘green’ discourses and values at a certain level of
abstraction or translatability, even as the introduced conservationist mean-
ings interacted unpredictably with indigenous ones. While it is true that,
historically and in principle, western environmentalism may support and
even reproduce colonial and neo-colonial organizations of space and categor-
izations of people and animals, western science and activism also challenges
them. The cycle of assertion and counter-assertion—already evident in these
texts—is best circumvented with evidence.
An interesting case study in this regard is Chia-Ju Chang’s Reconstruction

essay, ‘Reconciling Ethnicity, Subalternity and Chinese Eco-aesthetics:
Human and Animal Subjects in Lu Chuan’s Kekexili: Mountain Patrol’, discuss-
ing a Chinese-American co-production that dramatizes the struggle of a
Tibetan patrol against ethnic Han (i.e. majority Chinese) poachers of ante-
lopes for fur. Thanks to the international demand for the shahtoosh or
ring-shawl (so-called because it is fine enough to pass through a wedding
ring), the Tibetan antelope is thought to be in imminent danger of extinction
in the wild. It is this international dimension, however, that Chang claims has
been elided in the film: when the Mandarin commentary states that shahtoosh
are exported to American and European markets, the English translation
renders it as ‘foreign countries’. This minor alteration is made to carry the
much more substantial point that the film has at once to allow majority
Chinese audiences to sympathize with the ‘poach or starve’ dilemma of the
hunters and to invite international audiences to side with the patrol, while
implicitly exonerating rich buyers of shahtoosh. The last point is not plausibly
made, but Chang’s essay impressively combines contextual discussion of
Chinese Communist resistance to—and more recently, accommodation
of—ecologism, and the close analysis of generic tensions within the film.
The urban Han narrator, Duo Yü, epitomizes the idea that ‘Kekexili can be seen
as an ambivalent project that simultaneously embraces and subverts the
master plot of nationalism and modernization’ (Section 22): he engages
with the ethnic Amdo and Khan Tibetans, witnesses their rituals and supports
their efforts to prevent poaching, but then fulfills their mission for them when
his videojournalism persuades the government to protect the antelope in the
metropolitan centre. Moreover, aesthetically the film ‘vacillates in between
what Patrick Murphy would call the ‘‘timeliness’’ [of an] environmental,
historic or documentary present and ‘‘the timelessness of epiphanic experi-
ence’’, or the Taoist or Chan Buddhist aestheticism’ of the sublime Tibetan
mise en scène (Section 27). While Chang is rightly alert to the risk that the
32 | Ecocriticism
latter could represent a cynical repackaging of an ‘eternal’ China for export,

she argues convincingly that the film’s handling of silence, ‘empty space’ and
the death of a patrol member in quicksand actually evokes an unsentimental
biocentrism rooted in traditional Daoist thought. While Japanese, Korean and
Taiwanese ecocritics have tended to align with developments in America,
Chinese ecocriticism seems to be developing more independently, growing
rapidly in several institutions. Chia-Ju Chan is based in the USA, but her
discussion is a powerful illustration of the official ambivalence towards envir-
onmentalist ideas in the People’s Republic, and its cultural ramifications.
The last text under discussion, from a period fairly well served by
eco-poco research, is the special edition of Interdisciplinary Studies in

Literature and the Environment, the flagship ecocritical journal, edited by
Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Cara Cilano (Isle 14:i[2007]). Two of the four
essays they select, however, suggest that the lessons need to flow both ways
between postcolonialism and ecocriticism, because they are really only in the
loosest sense ‘ecological’ studies. Lisa Perfetti’s ‘The Postcolonial Land that
Needs to Be Loved: Caribbean Nature and the Garden in Simone
Schwartz-Bart’s Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle’ is to be welcomed for its
unusual attention to Francophone Caribbean literature, which it reads as a
kind of anti-colonial georgic. For Perfetti, writing about Guadeloupe gardens
is ‘[n]ot only a way to rethink the human place in nature, it is a space that
enables black islanders to rethink their place in history and to reclaim their
relation to land and community’ (p. 97). Promising as this line of enquiry
appears, there is a continual sense that the opposition between the ‘garden
ethic’ (Michael Pollan) and sugarcane monoculture in Schwartz-Bart’s novel
has more postcolonial than ecological significance. Similarly in Briar Wood’s
‘Mana Wāhine and Ecocriticism in Some Post-80s Writing by Maori
Women’, the environmentalist aspect of the continuing struggle of Maori
women to reclaim and redeem ancestral identities and landscapes is always
taken for granted. So Wood, explaining the complex meaning of the term
wāhine—‘women’, but with a much wider mythological sense also—says
that ‘[r]etellings and representations of creation stories can situate personal
histories as location specific and sometimes, time specific events. Literary
and artistic responses to local histories, landmarks, and ecosystems, as well
as national and global movements, are contemporary indicators of ecological
responses to the environment and human inhabitation of place’ (p. 109).
While there is considerable anthropological interest in Wood’s account, the
specificity of ‘ecosystems’, as opposed to cultural landscapes, never connects
to anything in either historic or contemporary Maori culture in this account.
At the same time, the essay evinces a certain lack of confidence in Maori
Ecocriticism | 33
formulations, as when the ancient, resonant concept of mana wāhine (very

crudely, women’s power) has to be defended against the rather recent
European concern about ‘gender essentialism’. As other work reviewed
here has shown, the bar for ‘ecocritical’ work of substance should be some-
what above nature thematics and literary responses to landscape.
Rajender Kaur’s ‘‘‘Home Is Where the Oracella Are’’: Toward a New
Paradigm of Transcultural Ecocritical Engagement in Amitav Ghosh’s The
Hungry Tide’ is rather better, thanks in part to the inherent attractions of
the superb novel it tackles. As Kaur points out, Ghosh’s novel is at once
attuned to history, conflict and ecology—and even ecology as history, rather
than as a transcendent, extra-human order. The interest of the protagonist,

American-born cetologist Piyali Roy, in freshwater dolphins could not be
more timely given that the baiji, or Yangtze River dolphin was declared
‘functionally extinct’ in 2006, the first aquatic mammal to be declared ex-
tinct since the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s. Her scientific study,
however, quickly becomes embroiled in the complex politics, history and
ecology of the Ganges delta on the India–Bangladesh border where she goes
to work. As Kaur points out, ‘[t]he distinctive topography of the Sundarbans,
an immense archipelago of islands, some of which are large and have lasted
for millennia, while other, smaller ones, are daily destroyed and washed into
being, effectively embodies the duality of nature in its transhistoricity and
mutability’ (pp. 126–7). This dual—or rather, multiple—aspect is particu-
larly evident in the case of the Royal Bengal tiger, which is at the same time
an elemental presence in a mythic battle for survival, an endangered species
beloved by foreign donors, the vigorously protected object of Project
Tiger—a national campaign of conservation launched by Indira Gandhi—
and a lethal predator feared by the poor human inhabitants of the
Sundarbans. Much of the pleasure of the novel lies in Ghosh’s skill in keeping
all these competing perspectives vividly in play as a grippingly dramatic plot
develops, part of which concerns an historically accurate narration of the
violent elimination of Morichjhapi, a village of poor squatters, in 1977 in the
name of tiger conservation. In terms of Kaur’s thesis, though, his postcolo-
nial critique of the ‘debacle’ of the eviction risks losing touch with his
admission, in a footnote, that the tiny world population of tigers ‘would
be lower’ were it not for Project Tiger. The liberal ambivalence to which
both The Hungry Tide and Kaur’s discussion of it seem to cleave looks likely to
manifest itself enduringly as an internal tension in the eco-poco construct.
My final example is also the best example of the postcolonial turn in the
review period: Anthony Carrigan’s ‘Preening with Privilege, Bubbling
Bilge: Representations of Cruise Tourism in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for
34 | Ecocriticism
the Widow and Derek Walcott’s Omeros’. Key elements in its success are the
narrow focus of its environmental interest, and the sophistication of the
readings it draws out of its literary materials. Thus when Marshall’s
black American protagonist suffers a breakdown on a Caribbean cruise
ship, it extends the novel’s representation of what eludes realist narrative:
‘spiritual subtext, psychological observation and ecological processes’
(p. 149). The fundamental analogy Marshall proposes between the cruise
ship and literary realism, both of which enable and constrain the protagon-
ist’s transformed relationship to the Caribbean, turns out to be only just
strong enough to bear the weight the essay places on it. In the case of

Walcott, it is the genre of epic, at once conspicuously adhered to and os-
tentatiously rejected, at the centre of Marshall’s tension between form and
content. In Omeros, he suggests, cruise ships symbolize colonial arrogance but
also, more ambivalently, the blandishments of fame that this Caribbean epic
itself might attract. Thus, to borrow Morton’s terms, Walcott would seem
to be caught in the travails of romantic consumerism, which links
Orientalizing mass tourism and his poem. However, this potentially disabling
complicity is turned into a strength by Marshall’s claim that ‘[a]rtists not only
create the environments they defend by ‘‘vitalizing’’ them mimetically but, in
doing so, protect themselves from destructive transformations of place and
creative potential. Crucially this occurs not by rejecting globalized modern-
ity but through its incorporation into the aesthetic realm’ (p. 156). Accepting
that both poem and cruise ship are, so to speak, in the same boat in their
aestheticizing relationship with the Caribbean leads Marshall to the remark-
able conclusion that ‘rather than opposing cruise tourism’s neocolonial affi-
nities, a more nuanced means of urging greater industry sustainability might
emerge from highlighting the points of potential productivity that result from
its ongoing regional presence’ (p. 154). In one sense, Marshall’s appeal to
the cruise industry typifies the Horton Hears a Who problem of ecocriticism—
is anyone listening? And yet his essay is intriguing evidence of the potential
that yet lies in eco-poco: it is genuinely ecological, drawing attention to the
enormous impact of liners on Caribbean island ecosystems; its interest in the
orientalizing of cruises and their neocolonial economics is properly post-
colonial; and its literary criticism is diligent and revealing. Next year’s review
will see a great deal more research at this nexus.
Books Reviewed
Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms. IndianaUP. [2008]
pp. 448. pb £16.99 ISBN 0 2532 1946 9.
Ecocriticism | 35
Gifford, Terry, and Fiona Becket, eds. Culture, Creativity and Environment: New
Environmentalist Criticism. Rodopi. [2007] pp. 260. pb E52 ISBN 9 0420 2250 7.
Ingram, Annie, Ian Marshall, Daniel J. Philippon and Adam W. Sweeting, eds. Coming
into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice. UGeoP. [2007]
pp. 280. pb £20.95 ISBN 0 8203 2886 3.
Lopez, Tony, and Anthony Caleshu, eds. Poetry and Public Language. Shearsman.
[2007] pp. 296. pb £15.95 ISBN 1 9057 0064 4.
Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics.
HarvardUP. [2007] pp. 262. hb £38.95 ISBN 0 6740 2434 6.
Olaniyan, Tejumola, and Ato Quayson, eds. African Literature: An Anthology of

Criticism and Theory. Blackwell. [2007] pp. 792. pb £29.99 ISBN 1 4051 1201 8.
Slovic, Scott. Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical
Responsibility. UNevP. [2008] pp. 264. pb £20.95 ISBN 0 6740 2434 6.
Whitley, David. The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation. Ashgate. [2008] pp. 162. hb
£45 ISBN 0 7546 6085 0.

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1. Normal Science: The Usual Practice of Ecocriticism

Elaine Showalter, ecocriticism has at once critiqued ‘representations of

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A kindred form of geniality characterizes Scott Slovic’s Going Away to

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3. Against Nature: The Ecocritical Challenge to Extant

determination, and to the author’s argument, would be intolerably high were

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Deconstruction always relies on distension of concepts to generate its char-

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The Future of Environmental Criticism (Blackwell [2005]). While it would be

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Williams. Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia estate ‘hid a plantation full of slaves’,

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One indication that Morton’s intervention is not quite as radical as he

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4. Ecological Materialism: Approaches Founded in

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environmental behaviour to empirical test. Humanities research tends to be

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cultural relativism and opens up mutually informing lines of communication

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might now have on our morphology and behaviour cannot be specified

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‘Queering Ecocultural Studies’, CulS 22:iii[2008]), this is a beautiful work of

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What Wheeler describes—in moderately thrilling terms, it should

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5. Globality/Postcoloniality: Approaches Founded in

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Kerridge’s analysis departs from the premise that the neo-Modernist

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modernity that is little understood elsewhere. ‘Place’ embodies the fantasy

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highly mediated ‘environments’. It would make for a fascinating comparative

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African elephant poachers who slaughter Gowdy’s ‘She-ones’ (elephants)

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study of the politics of nature in Vietnam’s bird-rich Ba Lat estuary (unpub-

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latter could represent a cynical repackaging of an ‘eternal’ China for export,

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formulations, as when the ancient, resonant concept of mana wāhine (very

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